Oct 25, 2019

You’re looking quite Dapr: Microsoft launches new tool for developers integrating microservices into their app

Microsoft recently released Dapr, a new event-driven runtime built to help developers build microservices-based apps.

Dapr, short for Distributed Application Runtime, exposes a set of common APIs that simplify how developers code against their microservices.

"Dapr codifies the best practices for building microservice applications into open, independent, building blocks that enable you to build portable applications with the language and framework of your choice."

Dapr injects a side-car container or process to each compute unit. The side-car handles event triggers and communicates with the compute unit through standard HTTP or gRPC protocols. Dapr manages communication between microservices via a collection of building blocks that simplify how developers implement distributed system capabilities, such as publish and subscribe messaging between services, state management, service-to-service invocation, distributed tracing, and more.

Dapr is a robust glue tool that takes a low level approach to software micronization to connect various microservices.

Dapr is designed for cloud-first development, which often relies on many modular parts using different languages and development stacks. Dapr can be implemented on any cloud platform and works with any programming language. For example, developers could connect a microservice running Python to another built with Java. Given its flexibility, Dapr’s side-car containers and standard HTTP APIs will also integrate into most existing codebases, designed to help engineering teams integrate legacy code with newer services.

What makes Dapr especially powerful is that it is developer-first, too. According to Gabe Monroy, a director of program management for Azure, "Dapr is developer-centric versus infrastructure-centric."

Developers can write code in their choice of programming language while Dapr abstracts away much of the complexity of microservices communication. Developers worry less about infrastructure and more about building applications.

Dapr is a powerful step in the right direction from Microsoft to simplify the low-level requirements of modern software architecture.

Want to get more of these in your inbox?

Subscribe for weekly updates from the Software team.